A novel prompt: Upstate novelist's writing workshop succeeds

Aug. 15, 2013

Written by

Staff writer

Having been to many writing workshops over the years, I’ve come to see writing prompts as a kind of elaborate game of Scattergories. Sometimes they help, and sometimes they don’t. Every once and a while, though, these little classroom germs grow into short stories that then become fabulously reviewed first novels.

This is how Michel Stone’s “The Iguana Tree” came to be.

In the year since the Spartanburg writer published her novel through Hub City Press, it’s picked up awards and reviews and recognitions too numerous to recount here. Then followed a yearlong book tour through 10 states and 73 audiences, including a forum in Hermiston, Ore., which chose “The Iguana Tree” as its annual “One Book, One Community” read.

Stone has since come home. The whirlwind year is settling, but a part of her is still in disbelief over the novel’s success.

“It honestly floored me,” she says. “My pipe dream had been that just anybody, any one place, would read it and like it.”

Now in communities like Hermiston, “The Iguana Tree” has been used as a way to talk openly about illegal immigration, for it is the story of one family’s dangerous crossing into America. The novel, Stone says, was inspired by a young Mexican couple she met while visiting Edisto Island, but it wasn’t written with a political agenda.

“I wanted to tell a story about people who go through tremendous hardships and have to figure out how to get to the other side of that hardship and continue on with their lives,” she says.

Stone’s next appearance will be Aug. 19 at Clemson University, where some 3,600 incoming freshmen read “The Iguana Tree” over the summer. Stone, a Clemson graduate, will speak at their convocation.

All of this from a little prompt at a workshop eight years ago in which Stone wrote a paragraph about a rocking chair in a third-world village. The paragraph became the short story “Dance of the Coyote.” The story won two awards, and those awards gave Stone the push she needed to write more.